M. I’m going to start the discussion by introducing a general term of the self and what we mean, whether there is such a thing as self.

T. Are you talking about our sense of self, our ego, or are you talking about this mystical term like Jung does with a Capital S the Self?

M. I think its both of what that means to you, if you as a person see yourself in that very spiritual way and that is the way that you get your identity of knowing your self then it may obviously be an important meaning for you. Perhaps it is that both are totally connected.

T. I feel that if I look at myself carefully or look at what I see as my sense of self I see that I am an interface between two very big opposites, a very down to earth, every day self. This arises out of impressions and experiences that come from my senses or my ability to sense. If I didn’t have these senses, if I was totally blind and couldn’t feel as well, if I was totally cut of from the world, then my sense of self perhaps wouldn’t exist at all in the way that it does now.

So that is one opposite and one that I identify with in waking life. On the other side of it, I have the impression that many people don’t see a certain aspect of themselves. When people sleep they actually have an experience of not existing. If I put that in another way, they have an experience of being ego-less. And although that’s a sort of a shadow land, in a way that people tend to say that “I just slept, nothing happened”. Yet the more I consider it the more I see it as full of experience and impressions, some of which filter into dreams. In my life I have been as much influenced by the things that occur in that shadow land as by things that occur in the exterior sensory world of experience. That is partly because at about 16 I was able to remain aware even in dreamless sleep. And also in later years through deeply exploring dreams I was able to see that the shadow land, the void as it is sometimes called is full of experience.

So in general I see the sense of myself as Tony as actually arising out of two sources, and continually arising, continually being, and producing this sense of self. Then I have a differentiation in that, because through language and thought we have this knowledge that we are going to die, through a speculation of what happens if the self that I know through my senses disappears, what is left?

I do have a sense of a core self. Lately I’ve tended to use slightly different words to describe this core. It is something that exists and is self existent. It doesn’t depend upon what occurs in a transitory way, for instance through senses and impressions. These are always changing. Every moment they are new. So the sense of the self-existent core that is unchanging and not influenced by the appearing and disappearing of sensory impressions and the psychic life of thoughts and emotions, and the ever changing flow of the senses and psychic life, produce various ways in which we experience ourselves. The core, the centre, doesn’t seem to have a sense of ego or self as I know it. The very best experiences of this suggest that I Am That. In other words I am not an individual at all. I am the very process that exists in all beings. I ‘Am that I am’. I am the process that exist in all the phenomena in the world.

The Core Self

M. Do you think this core is connected in any way to any thing?

T. I think it is totally involved in everything. Perhaps connection is not a word that really describes it. If we think of connection like a train that couples to another, and that is a connection, that is not what I mean. Whereas the temperature in this room is penetrating everything. It might shift and change a bit, but thinking of it as the furniture the carpet and everything else in the room is a form temperature, then that is more like I see the self as actually pervasive in the same way, or in a similar way. And that is a better way of describing it.

M. That this exists no matter what?

T. My sense of it is that most phenomena comes and goes. Even the sun will die at some time. Everything in our life has a certain instability. The sun, the moon, the stars, are actually quite transitory looked at from our time sense. But the core self does not have that transitoriness. It simply exists. In a way quite colourless. It is not like a being, a big father or mother, or something is behind us making decisions. It is simply a self-existent radiance.

Years ago a friend of mine was having LSD therapy with R.D. Laing, and he asked if I would like to try this as an experience. I agreed and two things happened that have become powerful images in my life since. One was that I was lying on a couch while my friend was undergoing psychotherapy. My friend had a transistor radio on with light classical music on, not pop music. While the music was playing I looked up at the wall next to me. It was painted a dark green, and as I looked I had a vision of a huge mural on the wall – of what Jung calls a mandala, a great circle. And at the centre of the circle was nothing, emptiness, voidness. But out of that centre poured forms, animals, human beings, trees, rocks, and they moved towards a periphery of this circle. And as they moved, although they were each separate and distinct they seemed to move with a harmony between them. It was as if there was a dance. In that dance everything reached a point where they began to fall back, almost like a stone thrown in the air that falls back. So everything fell back into the nothingness, into the centre again. And that was going on all the time. As everything fell into that emptiness, at the same moment all life flowed out of it again. It was all a process of creation/destruction, destruction/creation, and it seemed to summarise the overall impressions that I have of life, birth, death. Everything occurs in a flurry of breaking down and creation.

So that was the first impression. I had the sense that this was about myself, my own being. At my centre was this emptiness, and yet it was everything. It was creating and pouring out everything.

The other experience which fascinated me was that (I think LSD is actually a diuretic), I wanted to go to the toilet, and stood and peed into the pan straight into the water. This created a lot of bubbles. As I did this I was looking at the bubbles. It was quite light in the toilet, and each bubble seemed to have an eye in the centre of the bubble. This seemed strange so I bent down to look, and saw the eye was a reflection of myself.

This was amusing because, if you think about it, I had peed into the water, and up had arisen all these countless little individuals, all living in their own little world. And they each had their own awareness. In a way they were all looking at each other and me. From their point of view they were separate and unique. They could be thinking, I am Sue or Fred or John or Joan But from my point of view they were all reflections of myself, and only had awareness out of my own existence. I was a sort of god who had given rise to countless beings out of myself. So it wasn’t lots of eyes but lots of I’s.

Suddenly the realisation hit me, oh my god, I am myself a bubble! I have existence because behind all phenomena is this one something that gives me life and awareness. And at that time it really frightened me. It felt as if I burst, like the bubble I am, I would disappear. It was quite threatening. But since then I have explored this. I have looked behind my own image of myself, and tried to get behind my sense impressions to see what it is out of which my existence arose. What I discovered is that my true identity is that everlasting changeless being behind the creation of the bubbles we call ourselves. This takes away all fear of death. It takes away the pain attached to the fleeting and illusory impressions of life we gain from our senses and thoughts. I had thought this meant a sort of losing of self, a death of self. It doesn’t mean that at all. It is really a gaining of everything.

M. You have made me think very much now of this two sided thing. You present the social self as this dynamic process. What came into my mind as soon as you started talking is the word soul, and that is a fascinating word. I don’t know the connection of this with self, but the word holds in it the description of this core.

T. You used the words connection with self. What are you thinking about that?

Connections

M. I don’t know. I haven’t thought that through. But I wonder whether our soul identities have something beyond being an individual in that way. In fact it is linked more with being embodied I suppose.

Hyone. My experience has been, using my own terminology, that I have a bigger self and a little self. That is how I see it.

When I left Australia, I left under conditions in which I hadn’t personally made the decision to leave. On the boat coming across to England, I looked and felt very sad. I was ill at ease with myself, doing something I didn’t want to be doing. At one point I stood looking over and watching the sea at the bubbles made by the ship’s wake, and the waves. Enormous bubbles were rising into the air, and the sun was shining, and the bubbles had rainbows in them. Then I suddenly realised that I am a bubble. Existence as the bubble is incredibly beautiful, but nevertheless my life is short, and like the bubble, bursts back into the water. As this happened I felt that it was the bigger ‘I’ that understood this, and that I get so caught up in the little I that fades like the bubble. I saw that it is the emotional turmoils that trap us in the sense of being small and pointless. Then we lose the sense of self that is really the great ocean that our small self has come from.

T. As you say that you are the bubble, I get an up-rush of pleasure, that you are sharing a great truth. But the human dilemma is that you might find you are nothing. There is that awful sense that it is so difficult to grasp, that you can’t get hold of it. We forget that we are that transcendent self linked with this little self living in the world of pain and emotions.

But I see the soul as two sides to it. One side is turned to the physical through our sense impressions which are ever changing and the other pole of it is turned to the changeless in us – the core self. See Core Self

H. Which in itself is an incredible experience to be true to actually be there is no problem but to actually be trapped in it

Trapped

M. What would you describe as the things that trap? What is the form of that trap?

T. Something that strikes me talking to a client group recently this person, a woman, feels she is coming out of that trap but her relationships with other people, but she was feeling so loving for two men, and she doesn’t have a problem with that, but one of the men she approaches it is so painful for him. She says I love you and he says how can you when you have this affection for this other man. He is, in psychological terms, almost as if a child, and is saying to the mother. “I’m Tommy and you love my sister Joan, how can you love me too”? But from an adult perspective, where you can love both of your children, that is quite ridiculous; of course you can love them both. But from the child’s perspective it might be that it needs you to reject this other being, and has this need to push him out of the nest, and it seems to me that is an example of how we can be trapped. It’s a perspective of getting to see things through some aspect of seeing through the child, what ever, when we touch that other self that capital S Self. See Ages of Love

But we have built in causes for traps in us. We can be trapped by our desire for money, sex, for fame, recognition, our hunger, our stupidity by our own beliefs or our mind. See Avoid Being Victims

The first time I really touched the sense of the larger me strongly I had just started a relationship with Hyone and I felt that it would take all of it away, even the relationship, all of that humanness would be taken away and I would leave this woman. In a way none of this was important. It was saying you don’t know that, its not that at all. It’s saying, at a transcendent level, whether you love this person or that person, that isn’t important. There is another perspective to it, the very possessive lover who wanted a painful dependent love. One of the great things about touching the self is realising it in some measure is a huge resource because it enables us to stand outside of the things we often identify with, and enables us to see things from another perspective, and it gives us an immense freedom. Some people who have perhaps thought of it in Eastern terms, maybe even religious terms, feel it as detachment, a sort of detachment that rejects sexuality. It’s not like that at all; detachment is the freedom to have it or not have it at all. You are not imprisoned. Detachment does not meant you reject anything. Rejection is attachment too.

H. Its a strength and it is a funny feeling because it is not that it makes you walk by yourself, and yet yes it makes you stand alone and yet you are not alone, because you are everything. But I don’t see it or experience it as clearly as I’m connected with you and you and you, and yet there is a strength that is bigger than me and therefore it is connected.

T. I do experience it as You and you…. and that is a puzzling thing because to then try and get hold of it and say if it is that, why don’t I know exactly what Maxine is thinking or feeling, why don’t I appreciate what it is to be you? And and sometimes there is an element of that that comes from it, and I feel it is certainly there as a possibility. But that it is slightly puzzling because I am still cautious about acknowledging this as absolutely as a fact. I feel that I want to see it and test it out, but I can understand that how touching that, people can enthuse about having telepathy. There is a sense of that and for some people more than a sense, there is an entrance of some sort of understanding of that.

H. I’m cautious in that I don’t want to dangle a carrot out there, but there is more to it than that. I’m not getting it, therefore I’m dissatisfied, and there is this carrot that might be just a carrot.

M. It seems quite contradictory by the more one feels empowered I suppose the more I know myself, and the more to use the words to free myself; a resource of myself. The connections are important to do that but they take on a different level there, but they are not there, the more you know that the more you don’t need them but they exist.

T. I like the word resource because sometimes working what it is to be in the shadow land, egoless land, the psychic land, the word soul, the more I see that the experience of self can be incredibly dramatic. You might have an experience of touching that whole, touching that self, and it is majestic, it is extraordinary but you are just an ordinary human being. So what? is there any point in touching it?

I do feel that over the years something I do feel definite about is that as a human being we go through stages of growth, puberty is an excellent example, the sort of change that we went through. I often remember a pre-puberty view of adults and young people and how this changes as we go through it. And sometimes the experiences we have at puberty at that time is very powerful. If we are looking at the dreams we are having at this time, powerful, religious experiences, movement toward manhood, womanhood, the drums roll, the trumpets blare, and all of that sort of feeling, especially if we are allowing it rather than fighting it, there is a role of thunder that occurs, and in the end one is a 17 or 18 year old who might have spots but a change has occurred. But a different sense of reality, of music, has come about, and to me these other stages are very much like that. The touching of the self is just one of them; there are many others that go on in the discovery of self. But that is one of the big ones the realisation of the self as one of not being limited to the boundaries of the body, and it does bring resources, it does bring a change. Although in the end it may even appear ordinary but you have gone up a step as in puberty. It leaves you with a sense of connection with the world and people much more that what may have existed before, and it leaves you with a sense of having a right to exist and approach other people and have thoughts and feelings. It also leaves a sense of hidden resources that are there if you dare step out into them. You can do things and express yourself that you can have behind you, within you, as a resource. See Genius

The word soul or psyche is useful, I use the word interface but you might use the word soul and I think that it has been lost a lot out of our language because it defines a world of personal experience sense of internal subjective, one face towards the personal and one face towards the core, Christian terminology the spirit, in Buddhism the void, and so it is that interface between the two.

Interface

M. I find the word interface attractive because its seems to be a definite connection between this waking and sleeping world, the connection between the smaller and bigger. Interfacing is right down the line and the dilemma is that we can cross but remain in one area more than another and in the case of the spiritual identification of the self how this can be so much removed from your every day life? You can have that identification but actually live quite a contradictory life. But learning to interface is a way of solving that and I suppose that is what you are working towards, to make that interface very fluid very permeable.

T. Exactly, in one LSD experience something else happened there which was exciting in this area. I was lying down and internally I regressed, going backwards through my life. not that I intimately remember all the experiences, but that a bit like Alice banging against the tunnel, banging against difficulties in teenage, having tonsils out as a six year old ….and at the bottom it felt like I was in the womb.

I had a sense of myself but not of my body, but bodiless, and as I observed my experience it wasn’t that I was in my mother’s womb, but realised from an intuitive sense that I had arrived at the basic me. I just existed and there were no thoughts, every thing seemed to be so quiet and still, as if all the usual activities of being physical and mental and emotional had stopped, just existence.

But there still seemed to be a current as was pushing me back, and I felt if I went any further into this regression I would disappear. I as a sense of myself was resisting the current, hanging onto the edge. This is ridiculous, so I just lay and realised that I do this every time I go to sleep, because an influence, a current carries me into a completely different experience. It carries me over the edge, but this time it was keeping me aware.

To let go challenged me and usually meant disappearing into the unconscious, a huge region I was always ‘asleep’ in. But now I’m doing that consciously going into that none aware experience, but now consciously and there is no anxiety. We call it sleep and the difference here is that I am carrying a fragment of awareness into that shadow, and at that particular time I dropped and was with the awareness of myself still. The me, I hadn’t disappeared as it usually does in sleep, but it was watered down as it were, but I felt as if something had caught me. In that state I knew the the ‘something’ was what had grown me in the first place, and was now growing me again from the world I was usually unconscious in. Out of that unawareness I was coming back into life and I felt like a seed that was opening up and growing.

Several things happened then, because it felt like my arms and legs wereroots in the earth and my penis was a tree trunk that would flower into a full tree with branches under which people could shelter. The ‘something’ that grown me, led me to understand that if I allowed my sexual energy to continue to grow as a tree grows, I would flower as a person and this central part of me that grew me was communicating with me, my core was saying “If you come to me each day like this I will grow you” (in surrender to the force that grew me). It communicated the realisation that we had this potential to unfold if we allow it to unfold and don’t kill ourselves as a person and ego, and that core is also us as a person as an ego, and it’s not about killing the ego but opening it to allow Life to grow us.

Going back the interface I realised that the connection is totally balanced rather than an acceptance of one and a rejection of another as if one is right and the other is wrong. Which some people see as a choice.

With or without an ego

M: I suppose you have, and I’ve got this assumption in me is that especially when you use the word ego it is much better to be more fully you and stand a better chance of knowing yourself in a more whole way. By letting go of the ego you were, it releases more of you, more awareness of your core, because your ego if you do not open it to grow can become part of your trap. But on the other hand, what you are saying is it is not really a trap.

T. It’s balancing, balancing the two, the ego becomes the painful trap sometimes in the relationship, the work world because we feel totally identified with its likes it’s dislikes habit patterns. So I tend to see this as a bit of software on the computer. Nowadays one is used to upgrading, you have a programme that you might like very much and maybe love because it works so very well. Then when you upgrade it certain additions have been made. But that it is simply a programme and ways of working responses, I see the ego rather like that….{056}

If we feel this is me and Me is important we stop upgrading, we stop allowing it to develop. But if we see our personality that is always changing, then have a sense of our essence being something more than a set of cultural responses, more than habits that our parents have put into place out of love or brutality or what ever.

I would like to say more about this business of the interface because it has taken along time for me to define it and realise it so definition is quite useful. I had a dream a while back which was in a house I used to live in London, there was a large basement room I was in the basement room and I noticed that one of the floor boards was loose and I thought someone had been working with the floorboards; so I lifted them up and there was an earth floor underneath and it looked like a huge raised earth that perhaps a creature had left in it’s passing. I touch this and with tremendous shock this huge serpent moved and a dead body of a woman attached to it, but as the serpent moved the body of the woman came to life and whooshed into the earth.

It was very wet earth and as I understood later there was a well there and the serpent and woman had plunged into the depths. I had touched something and disturbed it, something that was really powerful and I wanted to find out what it was. Still in the dream I got a pole and pushed it down this hole and this pole was ripped out of my hands ripped away. It was a good job I had let go.

So in the dream I rigged a big chain fixed to a stout beam in the ceiling fixed to a metal scaffolding pole all on a chain ass I had get something pretty sturdy to poke down this hole. When I did it ripped the whole chain the whole thing down woosh… good job I didn’t fix it to a wall…

The Norm and the Instinctive

I realised that I was touching some incredibly powerful thing and I realised in the dream there was this underground lake. The house was in London by the way, and this underground lake was underneath London. This woman was like a goddess with a serpent and they were like a power that was underlying the whole of London and this was quite frightening, that this power should be there, influencing human life.

And just as I was wondering about that the figure of Christ came into the room and that was the end of the dream. When I have worked on this, and I have really explored this at length, I don’t mean intellectually because it had a lot of powerful feelings around it. To summarise what I found the woman represented what underlies my life and perhaps all our lives the instinctive drives the drives of sexuality, anger the drive to survive in all of us, and Christ represented the social drive, the norm in society the drive to conform and the relationship we have with a group and others.

H. The best overall.

T. Not necessarily the best because the norm may represent the considered best and I saw that this often sets up a dilemma in individuals because they might fight the norm and ally themselves with their instinctive drive as an independent being. Personality definitely has an independent right to exist physically and not be chained to a machine; and they might set up a fight against society, but in an odd way this is such an expenditure of energy against such an enormous force – the norm. It might be the other way round, you might join the group and conform to the norm but often that sets up a dilemma the other way round with ones own innate direction our drives, and I can see this typifies what we call say the “bikers” the rough and ready crew the image of them wearing their leather jackets and fighting against society, the image of people who ally themselves with a drive for independence, the opposite side being the establishment as priests as officials police force people trying to keep the norm in place.

At the end of the dream it was quite spontaneous the woman and Christ met and merged together and I had a tremendous sense of release then of bringing these two together. When these two were actually allowed to meet in our being something happens that is a creative possibility for human beings. A creative merging began and I see like pop music as a creative resistance to norm. You have got the resistance to norms and they are shouting it and expressing it but they are doing it in a way that is acceptable and in fact brings them reward and there is that possibility of those two.

That analogy can go on in our lives, the difference between ego and non ego, and in our past we have felt that if we are going to be physical you have to deny the spiritual, and I felt that my exploration of the unconscious and watching it in other people has taught me another sort of truth that is represented by balance.

M. Do you mean that we have created these splits and the way we talk about good and evil the light and dark your interface is attempting to meet them to join them and not to create a dichotomy, a division in us?

Unity

T. Out of it come a sense of Unity.

M. Unity is a sense of presence or knowing to seek some sense of unity

T. It seems to me for a human being to achieve any sense of wellness in the sense of what we are talking about it means to become somewhat at ease with oneself and it means if my definition has any validity the self, is the world.

I am born into a Christian culture but I am also exposed to cultures Native American beliefs, Buddhism, I am exposed to those. My being having heard about the Buddhist void this becomes part of myself and to come to terms with myself I have to meet it in my mind and develop a dialogue with it; maybe that is making it into an intellectual concept, but to develop a relationship with it to feel at ease with Christianity, Buddhism, one must not necessarily become a member, but to find an ease. Technology is apart of the world I live in now and to be at ease with that, I do notnecessarilymean passive acceptance, but I do mean ease with what I connect with and am creative with it.

M. I wonder and obviously is one of the reasons I have initiated it, we have actually entered one of the first periods of time that we have increasing access to other cultures not to be bounded so much more available to anyone, anyone can pick up a book because our reading skills are the highest they have been in history, so that we can delve into ancient cultures, cultures all over the world, cultures that present a particular thing. On the one hand I think this is all quite fascinating how we can all take and use it to unify things in contrast to western culture that seemed to split things and I think can use cultures that have never actually entered that problem of dividing things.

T. Christianity as literature, I don’t think it is about splitting, there is a strong sense of unity. If I do this to Maxine, Maxine is god and I am god and there is that sense of connection again. Christ is saying there I am.

But I do see that the historical statement from Christians have been developed in an organisational way. I am part Mediterranean descent and I have powerful inner feelings that I have discovered as I have worked that my religion has been ripped away from me by the Roman Catholic Church. I know it is an odd thing to say but ‘I ‘ as an entity as a being of that culture say that we had a sense of the holy that was ripped away from us

H. And used against you

T. And used against us, plotted against us and set us at odds with ourselves. It disconnects us from our sexuality as I see it, the organisation that controls sexuality directs money,directs the flow of the individuals likes and dislikes; so if the organisation controls sexuality it controls individuality. and I see an element of control of people by the organisation, and that splits the individual from themselves, it splits their own access from the self and their god it made from Church teachings. I don’t say that the RC Church did all this, it was something that human beings did over a period of time, but it made individuals socially manipulable what ever the word is, you can manipulate them socially because they were no longer listening to their instincts.

At one time, possibly human beings were led by their own instinctive drives much more, and they had an internal sense of relation with the world, but human beings lost their sense of innocence and sense of connection and then they felt alone and naked. They looked for what they had internally from the outside. They had put what they had fel inside them and now looked outside, so someone could stand behind the statue and say you should not eat meat on Fridays ever, and they took this as their inner guidance as if they need those figures to tell them what to do – so that there is that split.

The Dilemma

This is a dilemma I have in this area and a dilemma that has gradually arisen out of working with other people being a helper in their change and also in my own process of change, and the dilemma is fairly simple. I have started the journey originally from a very spiritual psychic point of view. But because that didn’t seem to produce the change in my life that I sought. For instance I saw that in my children and I felt that I wasn’t really there for them; I was responding aggressively and all they were doing were asking me for time and I was feeling hurt by it. That started of my search for real inner change, and so I swung over to a very much more psychotherapeutic model that began to work very well and has worked very well. I felt that real change has to start with oneself. What it meant was the exploration was not just intellectually but was rethinking, replaying, refeeling, experiences of parts of my early life and seeing what effect this had on my adult behaviour.

For instance, one example, that was one of the essential things I discovered I will try to shorten it as the background is quite long.

When I was about 6 years old something occurred that changed my relationship with women until my late 40’s when it was re-evaluated. But being the only child and being very sickly my mother was very protective and frightened of any behaviour that would threaten to put me in danger as far as she was concerned; and one day I used to go to my next door neighbours for dinner rather than stay for school diners and walking back with a friend who also used to go home for dinners we picked some horse daisies

It was a wonderful day and we arrived late and all the doors were closed. Our school had a huge oaken door with studs on it and it seemed to us this was formidable. So we stood outside and we listened. It was very quiet and we just dare not open that door and go in – so we played thinking we would go in during play time.

But I lost any sense of time because I got so involved with catching sticklebacks in the near by river. I was lost completely and the time even to go home. But as I was bent down on the river bank with hands in the water, suddenly this shadow of my mother cut into my world, She bent over me and dragged me home and I can remember still the exact spot on the street where she stopped and said to me, “YOU hurt me now I am going to hurt you”.

The hurt for her presumably was that I had frightened her and she took me home bathed me dressed me in my Sunday clothes. Now this torture I knew all about, because this had all l been done before. I had been taken to the doctors to put me in a home, and this wasn’t an empty threat because I had been in a convalescent home at three.

It was was a real and terrible threat so I screamed and begged with her not to do this. I can recall partly through natural memory partly through memory gained through therapeutic process, that I then cut off from her emotionally. I had made the decision that this woman was not going to hurt me again, and the way I cut off was to stimulate feelings that she was awful, obnoxious, I didn’t want anything to do with her, anything to block my natural affection for her so I wouldn’t be dependent on her emotionally any more.

I remember on a bus she was trying to get me to sit next to her and I was saying you silly old cow I don’t want to sit near you, which was completely untrue. The truth was I didn’t want to get hurt again. It led, in my adult life, not to have any feeling relationship at all and I didn’t understand why.

So that sort of discovery actually changed and made me realise that I could begin to relate differently. That was very important because it worked, it worked in my life and I can see it can work in other peoples lives if they dare to meet the feelings and their emotions. But lately, the past few years, that was my path that was the route I took which was a long winding route through childhood, even prebirth stuff, but I begin to wonder if there is another way of doing it, if you can directly it.

What we have decided is that in doing so, that if you are ready to drop some of that resistances that hold you back it falls away so much easier without the whole lengthy years and years of psychotherapeutic technique. See Resistances

Can it work?

I call it a dilemma because I am still uncertain whether that can be so. I haven’t enough experience of it in regard to other people as I came to it through the route I have travelled, and being in a place of greater wholeness I do have a sense now I can show them what it is. This is a good state, I feel so wonderful, the pains, guilt that I used to carry around with me not just out of childhood trauma, but out of habits, that now, having seen that one can step out of that and say look, here it is, is wonderful. Here is a way to get to feeling good; at least I hope that in the future it will lead people to find a quicker and more efficient route. It took me at least 15 years to work through that stuff.

I had a dream that I would like to mention, in the dream I am standing at the very tip top of a tree that is about 30 ft high. The tree is situated in a shopping precinct, to my left there is a walkway that rises leading somewhere and pavements around the tree. People gather to look at me floating upon this tree, and I can see what they are thinking and feeling. They believe that this must be some advertising stunt and there are cameras hidden somewhere, and all will be revealed, so they are going to stand around and watch the fun.

But I am saying to them by simply floating there, you can see me here and you can be here too, you don’t have to climb the tree you don’t have to make all that effort. I’m an ordinary human being and I am standing here, you can stand here with me. Most of them are thinking, what’s the gimmick what is going to be revealed, but one or two are thinking, what on earth is he on about, what is he saying.

So I speak and say, “You can stand by me. You don’t have to make any effort. Like me, you are an ordinary human beingand you can be here with me”.

And suddenly, bump, there is a woman by me. She had accepted and she was here with me. Then another, bang, bang, bang, until there was about eight of us, and suddenly we soared upwards leaving a slow trail of coloured smoke, and by it we are saying to other human beings who can see this visible trail that could be seen for miles, “You too, this is for you. We are just human beings and have touched this amazing thing that can transform lives. It isn’t some magic I have, or some wonderful ability I can sell you. It is a power you have within yourself that you are overlooking.”

Just as I, you, are beginning to get to that contact, just as you were beginning to have that sense of self, and find a relationship with it, your life becomes somewhat different. You realise you have different ways of responding to different and so it is visible, therefore it might be that they can make that jump very, very quickly.

Pathways

M. It seems to me there are a lot more pathways being beaten down. It is not just the more traditional therapist client relationship pathway. It has been like a tree such a lovely image, once you have made a decision that that is a particular path you want to go down there are a lot of jungle paths. It is still pretty jungly but definite paths have been trampled down.

T. You can see definite trails. It is easier for other people to walk them. That’s the way I feel lately I call this the “new wine”,

I work with symbols quite a bit. The self is a collective human experience, accumulated life experience not just human, it seem to me that when I touch the self, I have been in contact for hours and as such have existed, I don’t mean the personality Tony, but that I have existed through out all time. Just focusing upon a particular period of history I know the essence of it. I might not know all the details, but possibly if I focus I could know the details, and I have existed throughout all time; I am the essence that have lived and because of that because of the pain, the suffering, the endeavour to stand, the struggle with words and experience that other people have put in, that is accessible to me, it means that I don’t have to go out into the desert and starve myself for 30 years in order to touch my c ore. I don’t have to, because other people have done a lot of the work and they have left a channel so I don’t need to do all that stuff again.

Come and work on your self

M. One of the things that has struck me about both of your work is that this building you live in, it is here to say you can come and do your work. See Wild Pear Centre

T. In that as far as we walk this path we can say, look there it is, it is possible. Talking about feeling good and that physical change is something that I am still amazed by it. This has happened a couple of times.

A few weeks ago I went on a meditation course which lasted for about 3 days and the whole thing was about having that direct connection with the self. You start about 6.15 am and go through to about 11.15 at night. You are sitting most of the time so it is heavy on the body, your knees ache, your back aches, and yet the times when I have felt in direct experience of my self my core of the self, all of the pain disappears. I could have sat for hours I felt upright the spine had lengthened and I was feeling radiant and the pain disappeared, amazing change for it to not to be there, within a 5 min period you have opened and allowed that to happen. Enlightenment Intensive

That is what I call the self existent radiance, transformation in the way that you feel and in the gentler sense I tend to say to people perhaps a miracle. I use the word miracle for that I don’t mean it in a spectacular way. Perhaps the miracle of a very fast change like that isn’t going to occur to you, perhaps you cannot change that quickly but you can do a slow miracle you can open yourself slowly to that possibility of change that brings about that observable shift in your body.

For myself I lived with chest pains, diagnosed as psychosomatic, but very painful for years, the period going through psychotherapeutic processes, I could watch it drop off as bits of my past were brought up and integrated accepted changed. Hyone has had a similar experience with back pain..

H. Hanging on to emotion and anger,…. You cannot believe you are doing it to yourself then realising what you are doing you cannot believe you did that to yourself

T. Doing it to yourself?

H. Creating that pain out of non expression

Mind and Body

M. When we started of talking we were discussing an interface which was very much between mind and mind and now it is extended we are now joining mind and body, and that strikes me as one of the most difficult stages to join together. You just cannot believe that there isn’t such pain really, and we have been told and taught that there is some reason why that pain is there, something in there that shouldn’t be there with a physical cause.

H. Your body is malfunctioning.

M. That’s right and its an external cause

H. Your not responsible and somebody else is going to make it better.

T. That is one of the swing overs in looking at this process of discovering oneself the discovery of more and more of a sense of self responsibility that one has created the whole sense of beauty in ones life. Quite extraordinary, to a point that I find it difficult to accept intellectually and yet with the contact with the core self comes a sense that I created myself, I am the creator, I created my being as Tony, I created the situation out of the pain with my mother I know why I did it.

One thing I wanted to understand, I wanted to build into myself all of that gradually unfolds in that process. It is revealing yourself to yourself, I find that quite strange. Talking about the body thing there is something here that is important… our language makes it almost impossible to think of ourselves as a unity we tend to think unless one is deeply versed in mathematics and can do it that way using a different tool as it were, but using the tool of language the English language anyway, its all to do with white/black, body/spirit, good/bad. It is loaded with splits and opposites that cannot be unified in anyway. You can’t have god and the devil they are absolutely opposing, that is a difficulty that in some way we must find our way around or through. {interruption by phone}

M. Splits, and one of the things that is going through my mind is what if it was a choice either or and language?

T. While I existed at this state of being and realised myself as that I am life and I am walking, that’s all I’m doing but inside of me is all my thinking trying to mimic Life. I am walking I am doing this but it isn’t Life at all. Language is a useful wonderful tool for communication, but we take it to be represent reality, yet words are simple associated sounds we make to aid communication, and we take the sounds to be the real thing. But in the state I experienced beyond pain, beyond division, I could watch my thinking mind being desperate to be Life itself, to be the real thing, but it was simple acting and feeling sure it was really real.

But ultimately this is not what I am. This is a big dilemma because many people never experience themselves outside of the world of actual language and the thinking process.Even if they are used to feeling and being aware of their body sensations and emotions, thought leaps in and mimics it all and explains it. And so part of it is to find ways of telling you to step aside and realise that you exist without all that thoughts. It is an incredible experience to realise you exist without all that, language. Partly what Zen techniques use to ask ridiculous questions such as -who am I before I was born – what is the sound of one hand clapping. However it’s a trick question because you think there is an answer to it that you can think about, but thoughts go on as if you are looking, and exhaust themselves until suddenly you have this existence without the mimic of the thinking you. In that silence of thoughts, there you are unified,….you experience yourself as a unified being and I can’t put that into words because there are no words to describe that.

Removing the pain

M. If we are talking about overcoming pain in this way of transcending …this must be one of the most powerful ways of acknowledging that and removing that back pain.

T. I think what Hyone was saying is the psychotherapeutic recognition of removing that pain, but I have heard people saying what you are saying which is by being …by focusing upon something else the pain diminishes and is gone.

Recently somebody told me that while they were at college they had practised self hypnotism quite a lot and they had got to the point of feeling bodiless because they had relaxed very deeply and their heart would start beating very fast and they were feeling very anxious and they were pulled back, then they started practising meditation ,….TM …but I’m not sure… And they got to a similar place but hadn’t realised the connection. Recognising that he had been there before must be a wall and some sort of barrier.

So he decided to do it again and when they got to the barrier and their heart beating fast to use the self hypnosis as a means to go through this barrier, which he did. He said it was just like going through a wall and he was egoless… and this lasted for 3 weeks and there was no pain. In his words he was heaven, they were still functioning doing normal things but there was not any personal reactions to things. It is out of the personal reactions that pain could occur. At times it was like a sense of something touching … what people call god or what is called heaven. After 3 weeks he was at college sitting and some friends came up and said what has happened you, you seem so totally different. He said usually when he looked at people, but I had forgotten to say that during this time when he looked at things, he didn’t have all the usual associations about things he saw it as energy and colours and movements he didn’t have ant sense of separation he was the observer and the things he observed, and watching people, he always had the sense of not being involved. But this time when they came up he had the sense this is such a wonderful thing I want to share it, and as soon as he said that he came back.

I’m back, the I the ego was back and that was the end of it. But it seems to be a wonderful illustration of a couple of things why in eastern teachings that state is prescribed. It seems to be an end to suffering and is about ending suffering. But reading eastern teachings they talk a great deal about human suffering and this is the escape from it, i.e,=. by killing of ego, like an interface gone.

I saw at one point in my explorations that it was a socially produced path to reduce the amount of pain in that society because of the hierarchical structure. In India the caste system produces such stress on individuals that this is the path produced to help people have a way out of that. It illustrates the point of anxiety, the psychotherapeutic path is to experience and to allow that to unfold to realise it and deal with, therefore the ego and the self begin to merge, instead of the ego disappearing like I have described with regression that the ego disappears and grows again.

M. A problem I have with this Eastern transcendence of suffering is that it still permits the suffering to continue, you remove yourself from the pain but allow it to continue for others. perhaps from what you are saying this is because of this loss of ego.

T. The tragedy of the ego if it that it is lost and never to be loved, looked at and healed; and what becomes social action out of the ego is never healed either.

M. So what you are saying is if you can go forward and grow with the ego it re-emerges and is a different way of producing change.

T. If you can dare to be vulnerable , while accessing the self, and let the self work on you. I do see a tremendous parallel between these near deaths experience where they say that during that experience they lived all of their life and assessed it … the self was standing there a symbol of the self,.. a shining being, the Christ, whatever, standing there saying what have you brought,.. in other words lets really experience and integrate your experience. That seems to me a very powerful thing to do and much more creative and dynamic than just disappearing, losing themselves.

But it does take some courage and we have a natural reflex to pull away from something that might hurt or burn it, the same applies in the psyche and the soul we tend to pull away from anything that might hurt it even temporarily but that process itself it might need those feelings of pain, that might quickly pass… and then there is a sense of having integrated and healed it. But I am talking mostly about the inner psychological pain that is so marked in our society.

Does it make a difference?

M. Would you say from the journeys you have made and the work you have done that your body feels different?

T. My body does feel different… I don’t feel like superman at all,… I’m not bursting with energy or anything like that, I would certainly say to people do not dangle that carrot in front of you. We are all going to die,… I do not have any expectation that I am going to escape any of that.

The self isn’t an insurance policy that we are never going to get cancer, it lessens the likely hood if we are integrated to met those pains and healed those parts, there is a greater sense of well being. I am 55 now; in my 30′s I felt terribly ill, I felt so bad there was a point that I couldn’t focus, couldn’t even respond felt, so depressed and had lack of any life or well-being, nothing to look forward to no reason to live, only for my children because I don’t want to leave them with a dead body hanging about.

Compared with that I am transformed but that means I have become a normal human being. I still have touches of arthritis. But I am an expression of Life itself and it is natural to get older, but that seems OK.

Compared with that I am transformed but that means I have become a normal human being. I still have touches of arthritis. But I am an expression of Life itself and it is natural to get older, but that seems OK. I love gardening and so see the changes as a plant grows. First leaves, then it flowers, as men and women do, then it puts everything into producing seeds – in humans many people mate and have children. But there are many other ways to leave offspring – giving yourself to others as parents, teachers, nurses, great innovators or inventors. Some explore new or old pathways into the jungle within us.

I think about these things, but I have this other resource that makes it feel that this is a part of my life …I have grown up, being middle age.. and I can meet death. I have met it experimentally. I feel in some ways ready for it. It has been quite along journey and I would like to slip back home to the self that I sense is there immerse, myself in it instead of dipping into it.

Death or Rebirth

M. I have met some people recently who are very experienced at working with acupuncture, Chinese philosophy, astrology, yoga, also in their 50′s… at the festival of Samhain there was an expression of greeting death.. a very positive reflection upon death, viewed as death as rebirth.

T. I can see that because it is like slipping back into that absorption again, the core… the radiance ..that is so inviting, it is not losing of anything it is gaining of so much.

H. What happens to those people who do not have these insights, experiences who still fear death?

T. That is there experience of it. Thinking about this search for the self there are many people who see it as impractical, I don’t need to do it, it’s a waste of time meditating on ones navel.

True I have found some approaches to it a dead end too. But it seems to me as practical as the resources one has to redecorate your house. You don’t have to use a drill or a paint brush or your house might not need that for a while, but things occur you might want to change, put up a curtain,. shelves, make an alteration, for me working on yourself is just as practical as that. With regard to what Hyone is saying to me that demonstrates the impracticality of it, that people have not spent a little while looking at their conscious imagery of death or the other issues in their life. So many people spent years getting over the loss of someone, yet looking at it before it happens can change their life. See -Life’s Little Secrets - Death Was The Loss -

H.. I’m just remembering a dream I had, watching my 90 yr. old grandmother and realising she was dying, standing in the bedroom with her I realised she was frightened of death because she thought it wasn’t dignified.

I showed her how easy it was to lie in my arms and to let go. The image was that she would stand up and fall to the ground in a heap instead of relaxing, it took another 3 yrs. for her to slowly withdraw to let go.

Another dream ……… I was Jesus, which surprised me being female, and the process of being Jesus was a male and female connected together they were one whole identity. It was the female part of Jesus that said do not be afraid of being shot and as I said it the bullet ripped through my body. In dreams past I would immediately come out of the dream as it was attacking my personality the I .. but in this altered thing of being Jesus I was able to face the person doing the shooting with the belief that they couldn’t do anything to me in this position of Jesus.. the head was shot off.. I still survived.. I am there, there was no threat to the body in that place, to actually live it this is where I talk about the little and bigger me the next week I am holding my head absolutely terrified saying I can’t let go, to actually live it is much harder and yet the bigger me which I actually wrote to my father who was dying of cancer. was - don’t be afraid.

One of my clients presented me with an image of her boyfriend dying …and in his death he was still breathing and calling to her… from this plastic bag he had been zipped into, he still could not let go in the death of the relationship, holding on.

M. I suppose you have to be very sure to let go

H. Even to experience it, even in my dream , experiencing being Jesus….. and then the next week being incredible scared,…. climbed back into the trap of the little self….the fear of letting go… that is where a lot of us stand….

T. Perhaps it is language that makes this differentiation between the little self and the bigger self… but when I am there it does not exist in that way in the thinking we are doing,.. I dipped into feeling that bigness a few times…..692… end of side 3

It’d quite difficult to put into words it has imagery with it to describe that well I can see that. that sense of myself simply exists, the sense of my self usually I have existing in this space and I might occupy a few feet beyond my head… yes I feel it is beyond my body.

H. I feel that very strongly if I am driving a car I feel as if my senses go out beyond the car so I know what is coming around the corner, I put my feelers out.. so I have enlarged my space it literally feels like a physical space.

T. You can actually feel something happening or someone near you, anyway at this time what we would call the back of myself that I opened, I usually keep shut, there’s the street… all that space you can look up the street it goes on… and on.. and that was me it wasn’t something other than myself, that was me, and also I experienced it as that was all of us.. we are all of us one being we live as a unified being not as ourselves as separate in our every day lives, so we are not separate.

Life expressing

H. I an just remembering another group we had all been working quite hard at exploring and Tony gave the direction now see what it is like to be another person in the room.

T. I said to them for instance to imagine to be in someone else’s body, what does it feel like to be them.

H. And I got incredibly annoyed how dare he invite somebody else into my body and I sat there and fumed,.. angry and that was it – fuming over this issue, it was my right to let people in or out … It was interesting because it proved to me when all the feedback was coming in that no one could get any where near Hyone, each of them in their own ways ..and nothing could be got from Hyone.. you can do the reverse and shut people out’

T. I don’t think, it was that wider self that could touch others…….. that issue of being each other. A while ago I was renovating a house in London and my son Leon was actually living in that house and we were sharing a bedroom.

I had a dream I was an Italian and I started singing, I had this lovely rich voice and as I was singing I woke up and I realise that this music was still pouring from me, I realised I was an experienced musicians and was experiencing the quality of people who had lived in the past and the music they had experienced, the quality of their life.

I realised that I can create musically, and immediately drawing from that resource this wonderful music was going through me that seemed to describe Mozart’s soul ….. and I woke Leon up and asked him to hear this I tried to reproduce this with my voice but hadn’t the capabilities but I communicated as best I could.

This continued and I saw I could test this, try it out write some modern music. Now this vastness, the communication told me that to understand music I needed to be shown what music was.

Life itself starts the most simple ways to produce something……… First of all as life starts, chemical reaction begins to go over and over the same theme – bong, bong, bong, bong over and over. This over a huge period of repetition becomes a note da da, da da, da da, just that action. But as it is established it begins to change and that in terms of life has two things going, it has a different form and it can add something else….gradually different rhythms can be built up to create a symphony. As I hear these different rhythms I was told, this is your body, this is how life began and music develops.. and then I woke and lost that connection but an incredible experience that all that has existed is ours as a resource. We can approach it and access it.

That is something that has changed in me I used to feel very much of an outsider until my late 30′s and 40′s with that sense of knowing myself and sense of being a part of that whole. I really feel that I am a part of the world…. I feel that when that connection is there and you have acknowledged it; I don’t know if this is irrational when you relax into it that you are part of the whole you don’t need to worry about money because there is a flow of energy a flow of credit. I am not talking about this New Age philosophy where I have the right to get what I want. It’s more that it is flowing and I can dip my hand in and drink. The opportunity seems to come more often.. to be part of the organism , part of life, sharing it’s life, it’s work, it’s struggles and ups and downs…..

It fits into what we were saying about society and the splits, the value, the culture that comes into it but I had a powerful inner experience, I sometimes feel that what these inner experiences do they take bits of your perceptions walking down the street, something you have read, and they put them together and makes sense, as a Gestalt. We have an ability to put things together and make a whole new realisation. It make you realise something you had not known previously.

This shows that something new was coming into human life symbolised by a baby, not an individual but a new type of human being with a different way of relation to religion, politics, national boundaries. The older human being was often quite identified with those. But for the new type those boundaries are being transcended. It’s a bit like the goose drawn on the paper with a circle drawn around it. Because the goose is 2 dimensional being there is no way that the goose can get out of the circle. But if it comes into the 3rd dimension this is no problem at all.

My experience of this sense of self, this core I experience, it as the core of all religions everything from every culture are talking about that even in different languages, we are still talking about the same thing even if we use different words. I don’t have a conflict with different view points different cultures, the new type of attitude will avoid any conflict and transcend those boundaries, the people holding onto the boundaries will be threatened because it will be as if you are taking what is absolutely necessary to them.

T. Something that links with what we were talking about before is that we are largely self regulating and this process of self regulation which is essential physically, so if we need extra oxygen, to increase our heart beat, our breath changing, temperature, that self regulatory process is a very profound function of our being. And this also functions at a psychological psychic level, and if I remind myself that this is taking place I can work with it with myself and other people. It is to utilise this process, like putting barges on the river and the river is already flowing, so to go somewhere it does a lot of the work.

I see a lot of psychotherapeutic process as quite laboured. They are not utilising the processes the natural flow functioning in the human being. For the core self, acting as the self regulatory function which all the time is trying to integrate, keeps our inner housework done, in dreams trying to get you to look at it. But we need to consciously take part in it. We might miss that communication….I see that as effective in producing change and moving towards a whole state of being. One of the ways of working with that is to see how it functions in the body, dreams as part of the self regulatory function. See Life’s Little Secrets

When we dream things take place and you have a spontaneous fantasy accompanied with physical, emotional, sexual responses. The male for instance will have an erect penis when dreaming, also we will often shout speak out, wake ourselves up, move; not only is the self regulatory process producing all this but most of it is repressed because a part of our brain – the pons – prevents us moving because our voluntary muscles are paralysed while we dream. See Paralyzed while we dream

Looking back at the psychological history of humanity, at their emergence of identity out of an animal level of awareness, all consciousness was originally merged, as it were, in a great ocean or pool. At that point no creature had crawled out of that pool. Nothing had arrived at self-awareness. No sense of separateness or identity had emerged. Then out of that ocean onto the shore of self-awareness, perhaps for moments only at first, a daring creature crawled and said – ‘I am’. Doing so they left a mark – footprints, two stones rolled together, scratches on a rock, a cave painting. And those creatures still in the ocean looked out upon them and wondered, until a spark was struck in them too. Perhaps struggling for a closer view they emerged and gasping also exclaimed – I am – and added another rock.

So many people in today’s world have reached towards the shore, we call it waking. It is almost as if we have been washed up on that shore without any personal effort. It touches us but wedo not connect with it. If we actually connect with this wave that moved us this far it could actually continue into waking us up to the enormous depths of we have, we would become aware of the world of sleep.

If we learn to accept that our life process attempts to continue our inner growth and we learn to take on a willing acceptance of this process, then what we usually consider as deeply unconscious material, deeply buried parts of ourselves, begin to emerge. Then we can make changes we can shift it and allow it more fully.

I feel as if the core of our being is available to know; it streams towards consciousness but there is often so much in-between stuff it can get in the way. These are the feelings, the unrealised aggression, the hurts, just like a stream with logs can get in the way. If we let it happen though it can push that lot out of the way, a self the regulatory process, which is the foundations of religion. People worked with this self regulatory process, unconscious material, fantasy as they did at Pentecost.

M. Your work does seem to have shifted from being yoga based to now your work with dreams.

T. It started with yoga to psychotherapeutic and now coming back to an approach to spirituality.

M. I was wondering if a medium such as yoga, that someone had chosen as to release the dam to get the water moving, can one do it from a body therapy to the mind in contrast to the psychotherapeutic approach to the mind, I can see the mind through to the body but query the body through to the mind.

T. I feel that there are conditions and some people who use yoga postures often do not acknowledge the spontaneity of the process or the main aims of yoga. Part of the aims was to slowly produce a condition in which the body can discharge as I have described. It is very difficult for the body to let go and acknowledge another power and if this isn’t done it is a self willed journey that they might miss the current that arise from the self. See The Two Wills

The experience of where I felt I had gone back to the womb, but it wasn’t the womb, it was a fundamental state of consciousness which the influence from the self led me to, was what realised the realisation that if I come to It – the spontaneous process – each day like this I would allow the process of change. I have met that similar realisation in other contacts. It’s like a coming to learn the willingness to have a relationship, it puts us at risk because we do not know what the other person is going to do. Can we dare that, to chance ourselves? This has an analogy with the process, do we dare waiting, not knowing what is going to happen, being ready to experience what arises instead of meditating to get this and this to get there?

M. From what I have come across recently it appears that many people choose to undertake a path of searching for something through relationships other through this path. It becomes a way of knowing yourself in a more spiritual way that in turn affects your relationships with others, but does no become he main engagement with those activities. Some people remain with the frame that to know yourself is only what is reflected back through relationships. Love, we are in a very powerful decade of relationships which become the meaning of life and it is interesting. Perhaps to really appreciate what is going on you have to move beyond this level as these reflections might well support the cans or blocks in the stream, it may prevent that true flow.

T. Everything we feel about ourselves is a truth, but it might be seen in context of wider aspects of our nature. Therefore we see it in a limited way; for example if we see what happened in our childhood as very localised, as something that our mother and father did to us, that is one particular perspective, but if we recognise that this is just one part of a continuum of culture and history we see it from a much wider context, we are part of a much wider set of events. Then you can actually trace the influence and see how the past expressing itself in our life.

M. Would you then say that relationships contain the microcosm of the things you have to address.

T. There certainly seems to me a tremendous influence of relationships and our relationship towards the self. In our relationship with our children, our lovers, parents, there is always this sense of how much can we let go of ourselves, move out towards them, how much can we let of them into us. I’m looking for my self so don’t disturb me at the moment. We have split of this search for self from our relationship with each other; this doesn’t mean we have got to be forgiving of them.

For me personally the years of being a father was incredibly enriching because in some small sense I learned to put my own needs aside. I’m not talking about being virtuous in a Christian sense for some sort of reward, it was learning that my personal needs could be put aside for a while for someone else. In that sense I feel women may have the edge of being able to surrender and be open,, in the past we have had a lot of women shaman’s because they represented that openness. See How I Became A Virgin

M. This notion of well-being and health could therefore be so easily related to love… very connected, learning to love, learning to love your children teaches you so much about yourself and your identity of who you are and what you feel.

T. I had a powerful experience working in Greece running a seed group. There I took a turn at the end in a very supportive group. For me I had this feeling of energy flowing up to the top of my head which opened right out, and then it stopped. But we stayed and then I crumpled and felt that I was dying; I felt that this was the end, that I would no longer continue the relationship with people that I loved, it was the end, letting go time. I really wept because I felt it very fully and it did feel an end of me and my life, my work and all I had done and been.

I lay there, finished, and it continued as a spontaneous subjective view. I saw my father who had died some years before, walking towards me. There I saw this crumpled body, what was my own dead body now a shell. And my father lifted the body and walked with it and lay this dead body in a beautiful meadow. This shell had no life of it’s own, but gradually I came to life in it. As I was resurrected I saw that all that I had given to others, and all I have received from others entered into the shell and gave it life. See Death was the Loss

So that if we think of life after death is a re-emergence into that oneness, if our life outside of that oneness has never given anything for anybody else, as the other aspect to the whole had never given anything or received anything there is nothing to give there is nothing to live there is nothing that can survive death , nothing that has a relationship with the whole. To me that realisation in very important as far as our sense of well being and health is concerned individually and socially.

M. This reminds me of the theoretical realisation of self through Maslow’s pyramid rising to the spiritual needs,

T. If we take that interface image again we do have personal needs for our survival but from the egoless state the core there are very different drives that are not personal. Perhaps we have seen through history people who are polarised in one way or the other the self-grasping or the total self-giving, but if we think of the interface we can have both and they can find a balance – a deep self acceptance.

M. Some people around are actually bad and evil and that can be explained by the idea that they are stuck I was wondering if in this route to self realisation that automatically demands that people behave as respectful reciprocal human beings.

H. We were talking last night about people being basically evil but I did not use the word evil I used irrational. For if you cannot have a reasonable – balanced – view you cannot reason, you cannot have any sense of control or respect, it will not respect you as a being or a person; and evil I don’t know…scary because you don’t know how to be in relationship with it and I am not sure that is evil or a force we do not know how to relate to.

M. Are we saying that people who are on a way to discover themselves are becoming more rational more reasonable?

H. Yes and self responsible. To become self responsible you become responsible to other; self discovery that links you to every one else. I had an experience talking to a man in Australia who had been in a Japanese concentration camp, it gave him incredible pain to see the Japanese tying a child to a wire fence because he had been sneaking food to them.He hadn’t been a father yet but he knew what his relationship with the child could be and he couldn’t understand any man, any adult, do that to a child. Where is the communication, where is the relationship, there is nothing there to relate to if you could do that to a child.

M. How would you understand someone doing that to a child

H. That they cut off from any feelings. What area were they cutting off? They were very rational in one sense but they cut off their emotions, the emotions that relate us to all humanity.

T. Reich in his book The Function of the Orgasm, spells out how this loss feeling and empathy comes about in a society. He says it happens in childhood be being brought up be people who have themselves been raised in a ways that kills out any tender sexual feelings. He was not talking about the desires to fuck each other without feeling but the sexual impulse that leads to caring for a partner, to love and care for children.

This involves one of those huge questions good/bad in individuals and if you look at the history of human social groups it is fairly prevalent that one group or tribe tends to have a sense of itself of being super important which gives them the right to kill off other people, and this seems to be a basic way that nature works e.g. our body does it by killing off thousands of bacteria things that threaten it. But to maintain it’s own integrity it will kill. I wonder quite a lot whether certain aspects of society behaviour are sort of models of physiological processes. If something is threatening your own process there is no problem in getting rid of them. I often play with the word evil being the word live backwards and devil is a mirror image of lived. It does seem to be that something becomes painful destructive influences that have become destructive.

Reich talks about this in regard to sexuality damaged individuals or societies. Sexuality taken as a social phenomenon becomes destructive power. I often in my own experience came to realise that this was very profound. There does seem to be a process that moves towards self responsibility, mutual respect for another being illustrated by the following story – If I was walking along and met a tiger I might climb a tree. This might not only be fear but respect, perception of that the tiger might be feeling hungry.

Most of us has sexual need but we do not let it go into rape or sexual perversion on our children by fathers and mothers. Mutual respect does not mean not to repress sexual desire, but just to observe the situation of what is involved. I do feel what gradually emerges is the realisation of the need to communicate well, mutual respect and communication could help us do without many of the formal things we use such as legal procedures, in selling a house if people actually had communication and mutual respect, we could move around a lot more freely. Partly that is idealism, but I can personally see that I can make the world more like that by allowing myself to grow.

I think in a way that there is a part emerging in my life that is totally irrational. I have just woken up and I dreamt that I was Tony. In waking up in and becoming more connected with out core, then self that I am. the things that used to upset me, now seem trivial.

At one period of my life I lived in a sense that my life was all a huge struggle bringing up 5 children. Now in waking to a new sense of myself I say, “Where is the struggle?”

That is another level of maturity. Talking about puberty as another level of maturity, it presents itself as another level that in forming transcends what was there before. If we continue in that realisation, the experience of childhood is very real, but we have to leave it behind. It is still a part our experience, it’s still with us, but we are no longer the child. I do sense that we can leave the egoistic behaviour behind like we leave childhood. We transcend our childhood, o9ur awful period of ‘mature’ emotional and mental sickness, and we can reclaim the experience of the garden of Eden. And just as we create this dream, this sense of our life, we can create our reality.

I feel that there is a possibility if other people wake up we cannot but help re shape the communal dream and that flows on in a different way and I sense this as a real possibility

H. It has happened in the past, the influence of the change stands out.

T. We talk about a gene pool of a tribe or race but we forget that there is also a social behavioral pool that we grow up in. Such a pool therefore suggests our responses may be limited, and if someone comes along with a new set of behavioral responses, a new pattern of response, it is infectious because every one wants to have sex with them, if it’s good it passes through very quickly.

Hi – I am stopping from answering your posts fully – but will try to give hints; sometimes long ones because I quote from masses I have already put online. Also I need to take time to update the site – dreamhawk.

Falling of a ship is like falling out of a relationship. Are you feeling as if you are moving away from your husband?

But the dream has a deeper meaning also. It suggests that you are becoming more aware of the bigger you. We are used to thinking of ourselves as our body and a personality. But that it the little you, and you have a BIG you also. See http://dreamhawk.com/news/who-are-you-really/